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Close-Up: Live Issue - Ambient mines new vein of credibility

Recent campaign successes are leading to a reassessment of the medium, James Hamilton says.

Last week, the gates of Buckingham Palace were adorned with notices
reading "not for sale". The signs were part of a teaser campaign for
Beattie McGuinness Bungay's new Ikea campaign and also appeared outside
the Arsenal Emirates Stadium and in numerous suburban streets across the
UK.

Earlier this summer, the streets and alleys of Soho and Covent Garden
were hung with full-size reproductions of some of the finest paintings
in the National Gallery's permanent collection in a collaboration with
the printing giant HP. Then there was the 35-foot swimmer who appeared
by Tower Bridge as a stunt created by Mother to promote the new
Discovery Channel series London Ink. Ambient, that medium beloved of
creatives ten years ago, is well and truly back in fashion.

Ambient has become a tarnished word in recent years; after the high-tide
mark of Mother's D&AD black Pencil-winning Brit Art campaign, the medium
quickly degenerated into weak stunts, the modesty of whose budgets were
matched by their creativity, and the majority of which appeared to be
based in men's toilets and were aimed at convincing awards juries, not
changing customer behaviour.

"Cheap stunts like painting your brand on the side of a cow might get
you a picture in the tabloids, but that isn't enough. Ambient needs to
be part of a bigger conversation," the BMB founding partner Trevor
Beattie says.

BMB's Ikea campaign may have begun with cheekily placed "not for sale"
signs designed to generate column inches and stimulate consumer
interest, but the advertising doesn't end there. It broke on television
last weekend and is backed with print and press executions all designed
to counter the home-as-investment message of the past decade and
reinforce Ikea's positioning of home-as-haven.

The campaign echoes the work the agency created for Selfridges' "wonder
room", a treasure trove of luxury goods. BMB started the campaign with
small ads placed in local shops calling for mythical products such as
phoenix eggs, before moving on to large poster sites.

"The key is 'as well as' not 'instead of'," Beattie explains. "If it's
harnessed to a bigger campaign, then ambient works; all the things we do
are part of a bigger picture."

That doesn't mean that ambient executions only work as part of expensive
above-the-line campaigns. Mother opted for a hefty ambient element for
its London Ink campaign in part because the limited budget meant
competing against ITV and Sky with a full-scale poster campaign was out
of the question.

Mother commissioned the model makers Asylum to create a 35-foot- long
swimmer, crawling his way through the lawn in Potters Fields by Tower
Bridge. His body art - a tattoo of a Japanese carp on a bed of chips -
was created by one of the show's stars Louis Malloy.

"Most television shows use 48- and 96-sheet poster sites, but we
couldn't afford to compete at that level," the Mother strategist Britt
Iversen says.

"You have to add something," her co-strategist on the project, Jess
Lovell, says, arguing that merely filling a space and calling it ambient
advertising isn't enough any more. "It's the same contract you're seeing
in TV advertising - consumers are increasingly demanding that you give
them something for their attention," she adds.

Perhaps the best example of giving an audience something for its
attention is the National Gallery's grand tour, created by the brand and
design agency The Partners in conjunction with HP.

Masterpieces from painters including Caravaggio and Constable were hung
on 30 streets for 12 weeks over the summer in a bid to encourage people
to make the short walk to visit the genuine works.

On a smaller scale, Fallon worked with the experiential agency Sledge to
create what was billed as the world's smallest ad campaign, for the
launch of the Natural Confectionery Company in the UK.

The campaign was developed in conjunction with a series of "little days
out" festivals aimed at parents and children. Bespoke miniature 48-sheet
and six-sheet posters were placed around the festivals, the aim being to
turn the campaign into a media event of its own.

Both campaigns owe more than a small debt to Mother's groundbreaking
Brit Art work. And both show that ambient is by no means dead. Just
steer clear of the urinals.

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